There are a lot of deaths from hunting accidents and buggy wrecks among the old obituaries I've been transcribing, Don. And if they wife was young, chances are she died of complications from childbirth. What I find amazing is that if the next wife gave birth to a daughter, odds are high that the couple named the newborn in honor of the deceased wife. I've found that to happen countless times. There's also a German tradition of naming a newborn after an older child who died. If you watch for it - there's a program about the Spanish Influenza Pandemic in 1917 & 1918. The scientists theorized that those who survived were descendants of those who survived the great plagues & black plague of Europe. Embedded in their genetic make up was an antibody which gave them some sort of protection from the Spanish Flu. (Program usually airs on the History Channel or one of those "sister" channels.) I have a webpage for Ringgold County - "Old-Time Medical Terms: Their Definitions & Old-Time Remedies" http://iagenweb.net/ringgold/history/hist-diseases.html Warts must have been a common problem since there's 19 remedies for it! I lost my uncle when he was 6 weeks old to whooping cough and my grandmother talked about him up until her death when she was 93. I lost a great-uncle when he was 2 and an anvil fell on him & he developed pneumonia - long before antibiotics where heard of. This grandmother talked of him up until her death at the age of 97. I have the pencil tracing she did of his hand, done the day before he died. She kept it in her Bible and close to her heart all those years. (Her grandson was gonna throw it into the burn barrel before Mom & I rescued it.) I also have a page for "Old Time Occupations & Professions" http://iagenweb.net/ringgold/history/hist-occupations.html which I found amusing, although it's more of a glossary. Most terms came over from England. Back to diseases, there have been several obituaries that I've transcribed for Ringgold County where the deceased died from injuries received when the stove exploded. Most of the time someone (usually the deceased) was adding kerosene to the fire. So evidently they didn't understand fumes & flames? Then there are several deaths due to the ladies' long skirts and aprons catching fire - or a toddler getting too close to the fire. I remember my grandmother and great-grandmother and mother making lye soap out in the back yard. They had a giant (okay, I was a little kid - it looked like it was huge) cast iron kettle and used a wooden paddle to stir the concoction. I can understand how someone's long skirts could catch fire as most of the lady's attention was focused on stirring the pot or keeping one eye out for the children. If you look at the obituaries for Civil War Veterans, many didn't live to see the turn of the century, most succumbing to diseases contracted while in service which haunted them the rest of their days. Dysentery, typhoid, typhus, pneumonia, and lung disorders seem to be most common. My great-great-great grandfather suffered from what they called the "bloody flux," which eventually killed him in 1898. He never recovered from it. [Sidenote: His wife, my great-great-great grandmother, had her coffin made by a local cabinetmaker & she kept it in her attic for about 30+ years until it was "needed." Tucked inside of the coffin was the dress she wanted to "wear" for her burial. Her wish was granted.] Many farmers died from machinery accidents. Corn-pickers and hay balers and machinery belts claimed more than their fair share of victims. Most of the time (according to my memory and the obituaries), the farmer usually was out working alone and found when he didn't show up for dinner. I recall when I was about 6-years-old, an elderly farmer almost lost his life to a corn picker. It was touch and go for a long, long time. He ended up losing an arm and lived another 10 years. He told us kids that he didn't want an artificial arm. That if God wanted him to be one-armed, who was he to argue with God? [He also kept pink peppermints in his bibbed overall pocket for us kids. We'd flick off the overall lint and then eat the candy. Little bit of overall lint didn't seem to bother us at all.] Sharon R. Becker Ringgold County IAGenWeb Coordinator srbecker@iowatelecom.net ----- Original Message ----- From: "donkelly" <ocollaugh@comcast.net> To: <iowa@rootsweb.com> Sent: Tuesday, March 03, 2009 12:06 PM Subject: [IOWA] ilnesses of emigrants > It seems lots of people died of illnesses in Iowa, and not from just > smallpox alone. Some could have frozen to death of course. > In my research I found several places where ancestors just dissapeared > between census, or two or more family members died in the same week or > month, so I started paying more attention to diseases that killed yours > and > mine. > A new section of my county website deals with this subject. > http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~iadesmoi/Illness/illnesses.htm > > I hope this may help someone. > > donkelly >

"Sharon Becker" <srbecker@iowatelecom.net> wrote: > > I remember my grandmother and great-grandmother and mother making lye soap > out in > the back yard. They had a giant (okay, I was a little kid - it looked like > it was huge) > cast iron kettle and used a wooden paddle to stir the concoction. I can > understand how > someone's long skirts could catch fire as most of the lady's attention was > focused on > stirring the pot or keeping one eye out for the children. > > My mother grew up on a farm in the beginning of the 20th century. They had no electricity or indoor plumbing and they were always struggling to feed and clothe their many children. (Mom was the oldest of 13 - nine grew to adulthood.) Like Sharon's grandmother, my grandmother also made lye soap out in the back yard. On one occasion she was distracted by a cow in her "kitchen garden" - and while she was tackling that bovine 2 year old Marcella picked up the bottle of lye and drank from it. She lived for an agonizing two days. My grandmother never spoke of the children she lost, but my mother never recovered from the death of Marcella. Mom must have been about 10 or 11 when that baby died but she talked about her, with tears in her eyes, the rest of her life. She also told me about the 1918 flu epidemic. She, herself, did not get the flu, but she spoke of caring for her parents and siblings all alone and the terror she felt that she would be left an orphan- she was nine years old. After three days an uncle came by to check on them. When he saw how bad things were he told my mother he would ride to town and get the doctor, which he did, only to return and tell my mother that the doctor had died the day before. At one point my grandmother called mom to her bedside for help; grandma was having a miscarriage. When it was over grandma told my mother that she knew she was going to die soon and she told mom that she would trust her to always take care of the other children. Nine years old!! Can you imagine the horror of it? Yet neither grandma or grandpa or any of the children died from that flu - my mother grew up to become a nurse and at one time even had her own nursing home. She did private nursing well into her 70's and was always the first to be requested by all the doctors. But mom never forgot those hard years. She hated farms and poverty (and the lack of contraception for women.) She attended school in the one room school house that her father and uncles had built - eight grades and every student was a sibling or a cousin. When she announced that she wanted to go to high school everyone was shocked! After all, she was just a poor farmers daughter, she was needed to help at home, and she was a female to boot! But she was determined. She told me how she saved and how she and her mother "reworked" a dress her aunt gave them, and she spent her savings on a pair of "ladies" shoes (the first shoes she ever had that weren't someone's old boots.) Grandpa drove her in the buckboard to the nearest town with a high school, twenty-five miles, and she took a job working as a maid for a family there. She was given room and board, time off to attend school, church on Sundays, and one Saturday a month. She graduated with honors, went on for nurses training, and then returned to that town to marry the son of one of the leading families. (That's another whole story.) My mother never lived on a farm again. I was the only person with her when she died. She had been in and out of consciousness for hours, then around three AM she awoke crying. She was incoherent but kept talking about "the children" and "someone must help to save them." Then she suddenly calmed, and (I'm not sure how to explain this...) she seemed to me to be looking at something, or someone, near her bed. A smile came on her face and she clearly said, "Oh, Marcella." And then she passed. Genealogy should never be just about names and dates - the stories we have that are passed to us are held in trust, we are obliged to tell them and pass them on. Blessings, Kate